Crowd Oohs, Ahs and Shivers at Rose Parade
It didn’t rain on the Rose Parade, but nippy temperatures and overcast skies thinned a crowd that passed the first hours of the year 2000 huddled under blankets and ogling flowery time machines, a dead Y2K computer bug, and even a beaming newlywed couple.
In keeping with this year’s theme, “Celebration 2000: Visions of the Future,” robots and space aliens far outnumbered the cowboys. A B-2 stealth bomber flew over, igniting cheers.
The 111th Tournament of Roses was not the stuff of chamber of commerce brochures. You could see your breath at this one.
It was believed to be the coldest parade day in at least a decade, with temperatures still in the low 40s at the 8 a.m. start time. According to police, only about half of the million people expected turned out to watch the 5 1/2-mile procession of 54 floats, 26 equestrian units and 25 marching bands. But those who braved it were rewarded.
This was the first parade for Chuck Barnett, a 17-year-old from Los Alamitos. He vows he’ll be back. “I thought the floats were going to be cheesy, but no. They were tight,” Barnett said.
The stands and the sidelines were a virtual sea of red, as spectators, many of them alumni, donned the school colors of this year’s Rose Bowl teams: the Pac-10’s Stanford University and the Big Ten’s University of Wisconsin.
The sun managed to peek between the clouds as the parade ended, but it was too little, too late for some spectators.
Stanford professor Jeff Koseff griped, “It stinks, with a capital S. We’re all frozen.”
Not just the thin-blooded Californians were fussing through chattering teeth.
“Heck, we have better weather out in Wisconsin,” said Frederick Wald of Madison, rapping his cane on the ground to make his point.
The only people at the parade who didn’t seem cold were Ondar and the Eagles of Tuva, a smiling group of bare-chested Siberians making their first Rose Parade appearance to perform their ritual throat singing and eagle dance.
Rain had threatened Friday to turn the 54 floats, trimmed with everything from roses to eucalyptus leaves to rice to walnut shells, into a giant compost heap. But the showers ended overnight. It has not rained on a Rose Parade since 1955.
Some of the floats got a good soaking anyway. The colors ran on Boeing’s elaborate, futuristic space station.
A Dual Role for Donald
Donald Duck made not one, but two appearances, leading off the parade’s “human theme banner” of 2,000 Los Angeles area high school students dressed in oversized white jumpsuits.
“They look like toasted marshmallows,” said Sandy Alaniz of Riverside.
“At first I thought they were for some kind of trash cleanup,” said 11-year-old Philip Jacobsen, of Crestline. Then the human float spewed confetti.
Although not visible from the street, the television cameras clearly caught a plug for the Walt Disney Co.’s latest movie as the float morphed into a walking commercial for “Fantasia 2000,” which opened Saturday in theaters. The students peeled off from the parade at Marengo Avenue, out of camera range.
Disney’s considerable exposure in the parade had prompted some private grumbling among event boosters.
But Bill Flinn, the parade’s chief operating officer, defended the opening event as a novelty. “We saw it as bringing something that never happened in a parade before,” he said, adding that he believed “Fantasia” was a classic, rather than a commercial film.
“Everyone seemed to love it,” he said.
Donald, the Disney duck, joined his boss, parade Grand Marshal Roy E. Disney, and cohort Mickey Mouse (dressed in full “Fantasia” sorcerer’s get-up) as the trio waved from a flower-bedecked 1933 Packard Phaeton.
There were other commercial tie-ins: The Motrin man passed out free samples to cure millennial headaches. A chain of Chinese restaurants handed out fortune cookies and a coupon for a free vegetarian eggroll. Slim-Fast offered energy bars and coupons, signaling an end to the season of gluttony. Heinz gave out catsup packets, evoking the theme of its float, “Ketch’n the Future.”
Besides the blatant commercialism, there were moments of true romance.
Neil Neumeyer and Leslie Ogle of Kansas City, who had won a contest, exchanged wedding vows moments before clambering aboard FTD’s “Promises for Tomorrow” float, which won the directors’ trophy for best artistic design and floral presentation.
As the newlyweds smiled and waved, white doves were released from the float, which brimmed with tulips, narcissus, hyacinths, lilies and roses.
In the skies, Jim proposed to Suzanne. “WILL YOU MARRY ME? Jim (Heart) ,” read a banner towed by a small plane over Colorado Boulevard. The answer to the question remains a mystery.
The mood soon was snuffed by a blimp shilling a Web site.
For the most part, the crowd was well behaved, and police reported far fewer arrests than in past years. Some 86 arrests occurred overnight, about 20 of them at a drunken, lawn chair-tossing brawl along Colorado around midnight. No felony arrests were reported.
Even the animals behaved--except for one horse. The agitated horse from the Camarillo White Troupe was yanked from the parade when it persisted in rearing up and trying to unseat its rider.
Brian Gibbs spent three hours on the Rain Bird Sprinklers float with a 45-pound orangutan on his lap and said everything went according to plan.
And although a baby camel from the “Indiana Jones” entry bellowed mournfully as it reached the finish, Larry Elliot, an entertainer and camel rider, said all went smoothly.
“Samson wanted to quit about two miles ago,” Elliot said as the camels trotted to the finish. “We just had to talk to him soothingly, the same way you would a dog. It keeps them in a good mood,” he said. “And you always want to keep a camel in a good mood.”
When the sun finally deigned to appear, it shone briefly on the Badgers, more specifically, the University of Wisconsin marching band.
It dove back behind thick gray clouds for the appearance of the irreverent Stanford band, which included a band member in gym shorts playing a beer keg drum. A pep squad member dressed as a vendor, hawking such treats as Badger burgers, Badger dogs and Badger-on-a-stick.
The estimated 365 million television viewers were spared one colorful parade incident near Green Street, just out of camera range.
A 21-year-old man dressed in a white chiffon prom dress trimmed with roses rushed the float ferrying Rose Queen Sophia Bush and her court. Police quickly swarmed on him, and placed him under arrest on suspicion of trespassing and disturbing the peace.
As he was led away, Nahshon Dion Anderson of Pasadena protested: “I am a queen. I was meant to be on that float.”
Crowd Estimate Disputed
Most longtime parade watchers found the crowd to be much lighter than usual. Gray weather, a prevalent flu virus and Y2K fears were blamed.
Sitting atop a plank balanced between two ladders on his mother’s front lawn, self-styled crowd estimator Mike Gray postulated, “I would say this is 75% to 80% of the usual crowd.”
“A real light crowd,” agreed Sgt. John Perez of the Pasadena police.
Flinn, the parade’s chief operating officer, disputed the reports of a lighter than usual turnout. More precise crowd counts would take several days, he said, adding that the early tally indicated that 750,000 people attended the parade, about as many as usual.
Far fewer people, though, camped out the night before because of the rain.
John Cushman, a former parade director who still bears the honorary title, said for years that parade organizers have put the number of attendees at about 1 million as a matter of convention, and admitted that no one really knows how to take a good count.
A few people said that the super-hyped millennium festivities left them cold--and not just physically. Many people confessed to staying home out of preference.
Lana Lavitt, a Pasadena resident who walked down the block to watch the parade with her neighbors, spoke of another reason: melancholy.
“I remember being 11 years old and thinking about this date,” said Lavitt. “I thought I would be 35, and that I’m going to be so old. Now here I am,” she said.
“I thought, I’ll be 50, I’ll rule the world,” agreed Allan Renkus, looking rueful.
But for many, the Rose Parade serves as an annual reminder that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“It’s so nice,” sighed Rafael Mendez, a Pasadena landscaper who was leaning against a light post, smiling faintly as the parade passed him by.
It was his 25th year. “The parade,” he said, “is always the same. Always.”
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Contributing to this story were Times staff writers Jeffrey L. Rabin, Johnathon Briggs, Willoughby Mariano, Ann Kim and Edgar Sandoval.
